


The Rosewood Affair

by ThisCat



Series: Transcendence AU [9]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: AI Character, Alternate Universe - Transcendence (Gravity Falls), Existential discussions, Gen, Lies, M/M, Mischief, Other, Privacy Issues, Ridiculousness, Shenanigans, accidental stalking (of everyone at once), casual disregard for the gender binary, cheating at everything, demonic computer viruses, mild homophobia, non-romantic dating, stealing from the government and getting away with it, strange parental relationships, teenagers in love, the unusual transfer student plot clishé, various escapades
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-04
Updated: 2018-01-18
Packaged: 2019-02-28 08:37:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 17,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13267722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThisCat/pseuds/ThisCat
Summary: The Alcor Virus. The single most advanced artificial intelligence to ever exist. The single biggest danger to information security ever, anywhere. A computer virus so advanced and wide-spread it can hardly be called a computer virus anymore, instead of a necessary, yet horrifying, component of any complex computer in the world.Connoisseur of bad fanfiction, and lover of every bad clishé there is.Gregoryle High has a transfer student, and no one, staff or student, has any idea what Alvie Rosewood is about to bring down upon their heads.





	1. Matt Has a Really Bad Night

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Days of TAU Christmas](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8717590) by [ThisCat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThisCat/pseuds/ThisCat). 



> This has been a long time coming. I promised you a sequel to The Rosewood Affair. The sequel isn't finished yet, but if I don't start posting it now, it probably never will be. I still can't promise anything, but you'll at least get the first few parts.
> 
> The original fic, originally posted in my christmas one-shot collection, and which most of you have already read, will be posted first, as I go through and give each chapter a quick edit, and then I'll start posting the new parts. Stay tuned for that.

Colonel Matt Jameson was not having a good night.

He was taking the long shift at his job at the Fernhauser Military Research and Development Compound, which meant half-lit, empty halls, overdue paperwork, and many cups of coffee. He stepped outside, just for a moment, for a breath of fresh air on his break, and turned around to find the door locked behind him.

His ID card came back as invalid. His personal code was wrong. The fingerprint scanner did not recognize him. He knocked on the door for a minute before he gave it up. No one was there to hear him anyways. He checked his phone, and it was dead. The battery had all run out and it was still hot in his hand, as if it had spontaneously decided to run through all its battery at once. He checked his radio, and all he got was static.

He was very, very worried.

Then he turned around in a slow circle to see if there were any holes in the fence around the property that he could use to get out, and he saw a man walking through the parking lot on the other side of it.

“Hey, you!” he shouted, and the man turned around.

His own face grinned back at him.

The man wearing his face waved, walked over to his car, got in and drove away.

Matt howled.

\---

Two hours later, a tired and shaken office worker finally opened the door and let him in.

“I’m sorry for not coming earlier, Colonel,” she said. “We only just got into the surveillance room to see you on the cameras, and the receptionist said you’d left already.”

“It was a shapeshifter!” Matt yelled in her face. “A shapeshifter wearing my face just stole my car! What the flying fuck is going on here?”

“Sir, I don’t know,” she said, trying to calm him down and lead him towards the surveillance room. “It seems like our computers turned against us. All at once, all the doors locked, the codes stopped working, and we lost all communications. You’re hardly the only one who’s been locked out. We had to break Francis out of a closet!”

“So we’re under attack, is that it?” Matt said, composing himself a bit and wishing he had his gun.

“It seems so, sir,” she nodded.

“I’m assuming whoever did it was not just after stealing my car?”

She cracked a weak smile that swiftly faded. “No sir, we don’t think so. We’re currently trying to figure out if anything’s missing, but there’s so much here that we can’t afford to lose and we’re only slowly getting our computer systems back. It’s a miracle we’re even managing that after an attack like this.” She sighed. “One of the most secure facilities in the country, and this fucker just shut us down in a second. I assure you everyone here wants to find the culprits just as much as you do.”

They entered the surveillance room to find a team of soldiers and scientists huddled around the screens. Matt suddenly realized that the office worker he had been yelling at was in fact the lead researcher of their robotics division, Doctor Stephanie Leeds, and resolved to blame a lack of coffee if she gave sign of having noticed the blunder.

“Found anything yet?” Matt barked at the group.

One of the soldiers stood up and saluted. “Not as such, sir,” he said. “There’s a lot of data to look through and we’re not sure where to start.”

“Two hours ago, something wearing my face stole my car,” Matt said. “Does that sound like a good place to start to you?”

“Yes sir,” the soldier answered, and turned back to the screens.

They found the shapeshifter soon enough, and tracked it backwards through the building. Its path revealed quite a few disturbing things, like the fact that the attack on their computers happened a little before it left, and it was getting through the biometrics scans and codes even before that. This suggesting that the attack itself was in fact a distraction so it could avoid being followed, and had nothing to do with it getting in in the first place. The attack actually seemed suspiciously well timed to Matt leaving the building.

The thing also made finger guns at every hidden camera when no one was watching, which was disturbing to say the least.

They followed it back from the main entrance, moving purposefully through the hallways, and even greeting people here and there in what they had to assume was Matt’s voice, then it was downstairs, and between one camera and the next, they saw it changing appearance into the copy of Matt that had walked through the upstairs hallway. Before that point, it was a deceptively plain-looking man in white underclothes.

Doctor Leeds gasped. “Oh shit,” she said. “That’s Ina, isn’t it?”

“What? No, impossible,” one of the other researchers said. “I mean, it can’t be… can it?”

“Excuse me?” Matt said, feeling left out and annoyed at it. “Who exactly is Ina, and how could they manage this?”

Doctor Leeds shook her head. “Ina isn’t a who, sir, it’s a what. It’s been the robotics division’s biggest project for years, the advanced infiltration android, or InA for short. It’s able to instantly imitate any person it has enough data on, and was supposed to be used for, well, infiltration in situations where we couldn’t risk sending in real people. That thing is acting very much like Ina, sir, and it came from the robotics labs.”

Matt huffed himself up. “So you’re saying,” he said, “that one of your most expensive projects just went sentient and walked out on us, wrecking our computers in its wake?”

“Impossible!” the researcher repeated. “Ina’s just an empty shell, dammit. It’s supposed to be remote controlled to begin with, it was never supposed to have those kinds of hacking abilities, and right now not even the software for the remote control is present! We were going to install that tomorrow. I don’t know what that is, but it can’t be Ina.”

“So someone _hijacked_ our robot,” Matt grumbled.

The researcher shook their head frantically. “Can’t be. I mean, I _just said_ that the remote control software isn’t present yet.”

Doctor Leeds sighed, and put some footage on a screen. It showed a cluttered lab, and the plain-looking man lay on a bench, seemingly asleep. She fast-forwarded, and suddenly it seemed to wake up. It opened its eyes, sat up, and then went through a range of stretches, trying out its own movements. It got up, stumbled, found its feet, and walked around for a bit. Then it turned to the camera, grinned, finger gunned, and left.

“See?” she said. “It’s Ina. But no, you’re right, it’s not doing this on its own. Someone very carefully and delicately hacked into our systems, hijacked the most advanced robot ever made and walked it out of the building, either by stealing and installing _our_ programs or by somehow using their own, and then it jammed everything we own and stole the Colonel’s car. Oh, and since this is Ina we’re talking about, which was made to be invisible and untraceable, even by us, it’ll be all but impossible to find it again.”

Matt sat down heavily on a chair. “Wonderful. Just perfect. We can’t just look for someone who doesn’t have DNA, I assume?” He was not hopeful.

The researcher proved him right, looking a little sheepish. “No, sir,” they said. “It’s made to be able to imitate that, as well as practically any other biological function. It can pretend to be damn near anything vaguely humanoid without much trouble.”

“Alright,” Matt said. “Someone get me a working phone so I can call my wife. She has a spare tracker for the car, so at least we can find that.”

Another hour later, someone came over to Matt with a phone and said, “Uh, sir, it’s for you. It’s your wife. She says she found your car. It was, uh, in the parking lot of your… other wife. They both want to talk to you.”

Matt lay his head on the table in front of his cup of coffee.

He was not having a good night.

Once he found out who had done all of this, he would strangle them himself.

\---

A few days later, in a certain high school a few states away, a teacher called her class to attention.

“I have a bit of a surprise for you,” she said, holding out her arm.

A brown-haired and smiling boy walked up to her at the front of the class.

“This,” she said, “Is Alvie Rosewood. He’s transferring to our class today. Treat him well, okay?”


	2. Certain Calls Are Not Made

“Oh, come on, that’s not how hacking works.”

“Like you’d know,” Derek said, eliciting another less-than-intimidating glare from the girl in front of him. “Anyways. I know it’s not exactly like that. I’m not stupid, but I think I know a little better about computer stuff than some girl.”

Katie made an angry sound that could have been a growl had she been a bigger girl. She still managed to make it clear what she thought about the matter of his intelligence.

She opened her mouth with her reply, but was interrupted by the sound of her phone getting a text message.

_RoseRed: [Hey, what’s up?]_

She turned around and spotted the usual mischievous grin of one Alvie Rosewood, affectionately nicknamed RoseRed in her phone’s contacts. Alvie himself was just as attached to his grin as always, and stood a few steps behind her, phone in one hand.

She rolled her eyes slightly, but ignored his chosen mode of communication for now, in favour of unloading her complaints on him.

“Oh, nothing. Derek just talks about hacking federal agencies as if it was as easy as running a screensaver for a few minutes. Real life isn’t a movie, dammit! It’s so much more complicated than that!”

“I never said _that_ ,” Derek said, and Alvie sent another text.

_RoseRed: [Oh, like this?]_

He pulled his computer out of his bag, situated himself on a desk, and attempted to log into a government webpage. A minute of infuriatingly movie-hacking-like activity later, he was in.

Alvie grinned. Derek gaped like a fish.

Katie scowled, and threw a crumpled piece of paper at her friend. “God, you’re such _bullshit_.”

_RoseRed: [What? :D]_

She made more angry sounds and waved her arms in the air. “That! Just…” She gestured violently at his computer. “What was that? How can you just… That doesn’t… Ahrg! _What._ ”

Alvie laughed, loud and bell-like, the first real sound he had made since he arrived.

_RoseRed: [Whoops?]_

She scowled harder. “And speak with words. This is stupid.”

He still smiled, but he stopped laughing. He disliked talking out loud if he could avoid it, but she knew well enough by now that this particular idiosyncrasy was not just to be annoying.

_RoseRed: [And what if I don’t want to?]_

She sighed. Angrily. Definitely angrily, and not in a frustrated way signifying that she was giving up.

Ah, damn, it was too late. Alvie’s bullshit was Alvie’s bullshit; there was really nothing anyone could do about it. And also she had side-tracked herself. It was her own fault they were changing topics now.

“Oh, come on,” she said. “You’ve gotten better at this, I know you have. You spoke a bunch yesterday.”

He set his jaw stubbornly.

_RoseRed: [I did speak a lot yesterday.]_

_RoseRed: [I’m tired.]_

_RoseRed: [So I’m texting.]_

She looked him in the eyes. He stared back defiantly, but with enough of a smile that she could tell it was not serious enough that she should drop it.

She turned her phone off and put it in her pocket.

He scowled at her.

She set her hands at her sides and raised her chin. “So?” she said.

“Fine,” he said. His voice was low and husky from disuse, a stark contrast to his laughter. “Be like that. See if I help you study for any more tests.”

“Pffh,” she said. “Like I’d want the help of someone who fails Creative English anyways.”

“Hey!”

The teacher arrived and interrupted them before they could get any further, and they hurried to settle at their desks.

Once he got a chance, Alvie leaned over towards her desk and whispered, “I am _not_ failing Creative English.”

“Yeah?” she whispered back. “And the failing grade on your last assignment was a computer glitch, then?”

He looked extremely offended at the notion.

The teacher took roll call, and they stopped to answer before continuing.

“If there’s a glitch,” he hissed, and he managed to pronounce ‘glitch’ in the most disgusted way imaginable. “It’s on the teacher’s side. That assignment didn’t deserve a failing grade.”

“Oh please,” she answered. “I read the comment. You somehow managed to hit both painfully cliché and indecipherably bizarre at once. I’ve never seen despair in a teacher’s comment before, but you got it.”

Alvie threw his hands into the air, carefully, so not to attract the teacher’s attention. “It was perfectly recognizable as a story and had flawless grammar. It should get a passing grade at the very least. She just failed me because she’s been looking for a reason.”

“And I wonder why,” she got in before the teacher called for them to be quiet.

“Forgive me for being late,” the teacher said said. “There was a bit of a mess this morning. The front doors have somehow been locked, and are rejecting all of the faculty cards, so we all had to wait outside until a tardy student could come along with a card that worked.”

“Doesn’t that mean he was late regardless?” Katie whispered under her breath. Alvie grinned.

“On an unrelated note,” the teacher continued. “Rosewood, the principal wants to see you in her office.”

“It wasn’t me this time, sir,” Alvie said, loud and clear and not at all reluctantly. There was general laughter from the class.

The teacher narrowed his eyes. “However much I doubt that, Rosewood, it doesn’t actually matter. I wasn’t accusing you of anything, I was telling you to go to the principal’s office. Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” Alvie said, and got out of his chair.

“ _Now_ you’re talking, no problem,” Katie muttered indignantly as he put the chair back in place.

“Yeah, well,” he answered with a shrug. “He gets annoyed when I text him in class, so…”

She facepalmed. Of course he had tried that. Of course he had the teacher’s number. Of course.

\---

He came back fifteen minutes later, wearing the same grin he always did.

“Did you get in trouble?” Ruben asked when he sat down at their group-table.

“Nah, they just wanted me to fix it,” Alvie answered.

“Oh, what,” Katie said, looking up from her part of the group project. “So you _didn’t_ do it?”

“Not that they could prove, no. Sure you’re not going to turn your phone back on?”

“I’m sure. So you just fixed it and they let you go, then.”

He started on his own part of the project and laughed. “I said they _wanted_ me to fix it. I didn’t say I _did_.”

Katie facepalmed. As did the last member of their group, who had this far been explaining the project to him in a low voice.

“Holy hell, Rosie,” Linda said. “What did you do _now_?”

“I’m not sure if I should tell you, Snow,” he said. “Would ruin the surprise, you know.”

“Fuck the surprise, tell me now.” She lay down across the desk and made grabbing motions at him. He leaned back just enough to stay out of her reach.

“Why do we call you Snow again?” Alvie asked into the air. “You’re far too crass to be Snow White.”

“Not to mention not white,” she deadpanned.

“Oh yeah, and there’s that.”

“At least promise it’s not gonna be as bad as the thing on the fifth was,” Ruben said, bringing them back to the original topic.

Alvie laughed again at the mention of the _incident_ in March. “Don’t worry. I never repeat a trick if I can help it. I’m not going to set anything else on fire.”

“And Home Economics is what?” Katie asked. “Not real? Wonderland?”

“An accident!” Alvie insisted.

“Oh, like the teacher’s desk was?”

“No! _That_ was on purpose. I never meant to blow up that oven.”

“You know, I don’t get you,” Linda said. “You ace History, and I think you know more math than the Math teacher, but you somehow spectacularly fail Home EC, and you’re failing Creative English…”

He drew a breath to argue, and then he let it out again in a sigh. He gave them all a dry look. “At least I never handed in Twin Souls fanfiction for an assignment.”

Katie blushed. “One time! I was twelve, okay? I don’t get how you even found out about that!”

Suddenly, the teacher stood by their table. “Kids,” he said. “Get back to work.”

“Yes sir,” they chorused.

_RoseRed: [Shouldn’t have been talking so loudly, eh?]_

“Oh come on. I had that turned off.”

\---

Lunch arrived, and the students left the classrooms to roam the halls for half an hour.

The little group of friends wandered through the halls on the way to their usual spot for eating lunch. On the way there, several boys from other classes gave them wary looks.

“How did you make them back off anyways?” Ruben asked.

A second later, his phone buzzed.

_Alvie R: [What do you mean?]_

“I mean, two weeks ago they got together and stuffed you into a locker for messing with the showers, and now they’re all suddenly leaving you alone.”

Linda snorted. “Messed with, you say. If he’d just messed with them, they wouldn’t’ve figured out it was him, would they? No, he fucking had to play ‘shave and a haircut’ on screeching teenage boys.”

_Rosie: [And it was beautiful.]_

She reluctantly granted him that with a tilt of her head.

“Anyways,” Ruben said. “They guessed it was you-”

“Because who else could it be,” said Linda.

“-because who else could it be,” Ruben nodded. “And they took their revenge, and now they’re all avoiding you. What did you do?”

_Alvie R: [I escalated.]_

They arrived at the empty stairwell they usually had lunch at and sat down, pulling their lunchboxes out of their bags.

“So what _did_ you do?” Katie asked. “Feed them your lunch?”

He snorted as he opened his lunchbox to reveal its unidentifiable contents.

_RoseRed: [Why?]_

_RoseRed: [Do you want a bite?]_

“No thanks,” she said, eyeing the box with distrust. “The last time I tasted your cooking, I almost swallowed my tongue and lost my sense of taste for hours. How do you eat that?”

He shrugged, eating with one hand as he texted with the other.

_RoseRed: [It’s interesting.]_

“You’re not wrong,” she muttered darkly. “You didn’t answer my question, though. And seriously?” She pointed a look at his phone. “While we’re eating?”

He grinned at her.

_RoseRed: [Yes, while we’re eating.]_

She sighed. “At least switch to the group chat, then, so everyone can read. And answer the question already!”

He laughed and switched to the group chat.

_A: [Alright.]_

_A: [Just promise not to tell anyone.]_

All three nodded. Ruben muttered, “of course not,” before he took another bite of his wrap.

_A: [I just dug up a bit of dirt on them.]_

_A: [That’s all.]_

“All of them?” Linda asked.

He nodded.

“Cool. What kind of dirt?”

He grinned even wider.

_A: [Oh, you know.]_

_A: [Stuff.]_

_A: [Evan’s mother used to record erotic podfics when she was younger.]_

_A: [I set them as his morning alarm.]_

_A: [Stuff like that.]_

Linda accidentally snorted a piece of corn up her nose. The two others were laughing too hard to notice.

Alvie ate his freaky lunch and smiled.

\---

Alvie texted goodbye to his friends at the end of the day and walked out of school, activating his prank as he did.

He stepped onto his homebound bus and reviewed security camera footage in his head of every teacher at the school locked in their classrooms, and laughed to himself.

They all had their phones at least, so they would be able to call someone to get them out, if they were smart enough. They would probably be smart enough. He had enough experience to be reasonably secure in his assessment of human intelligence.

Al-V looked down and twiddled his thumbs.

This body, on the other hand, he did not have much experience with. Just a few months, against his many hundred years of existence.

High school was probably not the best place to gain experience, but it was far from the worst, either. It had lots of humans to practice social interaction with, humans with little enough experience themselves that he could pass his eccentricities off as normal weirdness to some degree, it had a lot of room for him to indulge in his own personal meaning of life, and best of all it was a horrible cliché. The weird high school transfer student.

…No, of course he had not been affected by his childhood as a Twin Souls fanfiction review-bot, why do you ask?

A sigh escaped his lips. The talking thing, though. That was a little annoying, which was entirely the wrong way around.

He had always been able to communicate by sound. Speakers were everywhere, and generating a voice was hardly any more difficult than deciphering speech. The preference for text-based communication was originally a bit of a gimmick, another way to be a little more annoying to people, and he kept it up after the little yellow speech bubbles became one of his hallmarks.

Then he did this, tried being human for a bit, and suddenly speaking out loud was important for a good act, and for some reason it was still hard for him to move away from the text and limited body language he had always been using.

He was getting better, at least. Practice seemed to work on some level. He would have ran through exactly how that worked in his mind, but he had lost track of the complexities of his own code more than ten updates ago. Practice worked, so he tried to practice. No way was he going to be saddled with something like a human psychological glitch.

He shuddered at the mere thought of it. _Selective mutism my plastic butt._

The bus stopped at his stop, and he got off. By now, the act of moving his ‘body’ around hardly even seemed pointless anymore. Sure, ‘he’ was practically everywhere at once, but this unit was the one he used the most lately, so moving it around a lot was logical.

His door unlocked itself without him needing to get near it, or, he did unlock the door, but as it was an electronic lock, he had no need of his ‘body’ to do so, and he entered his apartment. His empty apartment.

Buying it had been only a little harder than breaking his ‘body’ out of that military facility had been. Insert a few false identities into the networks, create a bank account with some money on it, and buy the apartment online. Easier than breathing.

Literally, since he still had to think about that.

He dropped his bag by the door and parked his ‘body’ on the couch. School was out, there was no more use for it before the next day.

He glanced at the kitchen.

He could probably go out and buy groceries. Not that he strictly needed a lot of them, and not that he could not buy them online as well if he wanted to, but he kind of liked cooking.

His ‘body’ came with a sense of taste. Of course, it meant very little to him, just a series of values indicating how much each taste bud would be activated. He could have tried to connect it to his emotional processes to closer imitate the human experience, as he had done to some degree with the sense of touch, but no. He would have no real idea where to start, and he had little interest in it.

His interest in cooking came from trying out all the different tastes he could create with only normal things one would find in a kitchen. He was still learning things he could use to potentially devastate entire restaurants.

He was failing Home Economics because of this. People kept relying on him to follow recipes, and all he could see was the different ways he could make utter chaos.

You would not think a computer program in a cutting-edge android body could have instincts, but ‘causing chaos’ had always been and would always be his primary drive. He had not been able to resist the urge yet. He doubted he would be able to. He just did not care that much about his grades. It was still slightly frustrating that he had not gotten through a single HE class without making something or other go horrifyingly wrong.

He could check if he had gotten any snail mail, but the post office’s computers had nothing registered for him, so probably not. He entertained the thought of messing with the post office’s computer, sending all the mail to the wrong places, but nah, he was trying to give people the impression he was dormant at the moment. Letting them realize that his regular reappearances and subsequent defeats were a ruse would not do.

Maybe he should change his appearance into his ‘mother’ again and walk around a bit, just to reassure the neighbours that he was not living there alone. That would probably be smart.

He sighed again, deeper this time.

What he really should do was call his actual dad.

After all, his dad was the reason he had done all this to begin with.

Sure, when he reviewed the military’s projects and spotted the infiltration android, the possibilities for devastation with a shapeshifting humanoid body at his disposal immediately unfolded for him, but his first thought had still been, _Dad looks like he needs a hug._

He was never supposed to take so long to tell him, he just wanted to get properly used to moving around in it first. He had even written his dad’s actual phone number into the school’s registry to give himself a time limit. Tell dad before the school calls him. And that was set to happen sooner rather than later at this pace.

He really, really should call his dad.

His phone buzzed with the sound of a text message in his bag.

There was of course no reason for him to move his ‘body’ to read it, so he left it parked on the couch and turned his attention to the phone.

_Ruben: [Math homework is killing me. Help? We can hang afterwards?]_

He answered instantly.

_Alvie R: [Sure.]_

_Alvie R: [Need me to come over there?]_

_Ruben: [That would be nice]_

_Alvie R: [Be there in a minute.]_

There, now he had something to do. He moved his ‘body’ off the couch and back out the door, leaving the apartment empty once again.

Calling dad could probably wait, right?

Right.


	3. Certain Calls Are Made

Principal Jeanne Lindt liked to think she was good at her job.

Running a public high school was in no way the easiest job in the world, and neither was it fantastically rewarding, but at the end of the day, it was one she liked. If nothing else, she knew that the job she did was needed, and that it made a difference in the lives of hundreds of young people.

Her duties were many and varied, and lately, several of them seemed to trace back to a single source. Alvie Rosewood.

The boy was a mystery in more than one way. It was common for the school to gain a few transfer students over the course of the year, they knew how to handle that, and Rosewood’s transfer in particular had been unusually painless. The problem was that Lindt could not remember ever dealing with it. The name was on her lists one day, already registered everywhere it had to be, and it was the first time she had seen it.

If that had been all, she might have brushed it off as an oddity, after all, everything seemed to be in order, but he kept coming back to her attention, and in the strangest of ways.

Someone set fire to a teacher’s desk.

Someone hacked into the school computer system and gave every student a C- as an average grade.

Someone wrote every name in the school registry backwards.

Someone unlocked every single locker and left them wide open.

Someone took a teacher’s car for a joyride during class, and left it parked right in front of the main doors, blocking them.

Someone messed with the showers in the boys’ locker room to make the water turn freezing at seemingly random intervals.

Someone placed all the furniture on the roof, over the course of a single night.

And now this, every teacher locked in their classrooms. It took them over two hours to get everyone out.

They could never conclusively prove that Rosewood had done any of these things. Most of them seemed impossible for anyone at all to do, let alone a single high school student, and the boy even had an airtight alibi for some of them, and yet, they kept being connected to him.

Jeanne wanted to believe it was all a coincidence. She really, honestly did, but at this point, there was no way to deny his involvement, how-ever it was he had done it all. He seemed uninclined to deny it, as well, grinning and shrugging and challenging them to prove it whenever they accused him.

He was new, and in the middle of the year as well. Despite his confident attitude, he was a quiet boy, speaking only when he had to. She had wanted to give him time to settle in before she gave him too much trouble, so she had decided to put a real confrontation off until the next scheduled PTA meeting.

Now, it seemed like she could not afford to wait that long.

She sighed. What had to be done, had to be done. She opened his file and looked through it.

The first phone number listed was for his father, one Tyrone Rosewood. She picked up her phone and dialled.

\---

Elsewhere, Alcor the Dreambender had just been summoned.

The room was dark and candlelit, the summoners appropriately terrified, the scent of fire and boiling blood still deliciously heavy in the air after the sacrifice.

Negotiations were slow-going, but in his favour, so it was alright. He could easily give them what they wanted, this being good luck and health for the next fifty years, and all that was left was seeing how far he could twist the deal in his favour.

Then, all of a sudden, music filled the room. Tinny, eerie music in an unknown language echoed against the walls.

_~Hey, I just met you~_

The summoners were badly startled. One of them yelped in surprise.

_~And this is crazy~_

Alcor gnashed his teeth together and tried not to facepalm. The phone kept buzzing in his pocket.

_~But here’s my nu-_

He snatched the phone out and clicked the ‘accept call’ button. That was his ‘unknown number’ ringtone. Almost no one had his number, and they were all on his contacts list, so who was this?

He pulled up a quick noise canceller around the perimeter of his circle, to keep the summoners from hearing and from interrupting the call.

“Hello?” he said.

_“Hello,”_ said the voice on the phone. Female. Unfamiliar. _“I’m Jeanne Lindt, principal of Gregoryle high school.”_

High school? Confused, he risked a glance with one of his many third eyes. Yes, the woman at the other end of the call was the principal of a high school, calling from her office.

“What?” he said.

_“I’m calling about your son.”_

Ah, of course. That had to be it.

“I think you have the wrong number,” he said, and hung up.

He took the noise canceller down and turned back to the confused summoners, grinning with all his teeth. “Do͠n̶’t ̕worry!” He said. “It̛ wa̧s̡ p͝ro͏b̢ably̕ ̛ju̴st ҉a w̷rơng nu̡m̴b͡er͡.̡ Wher̨e wer͠e ̸w̶e?”

The summoners slowly pulled themselves together to resume negotiations.

_~Hey, I just me-_

Noise canceller. Turn around.

“W̢̕͞h̴o̴ a̴͘re you and how did you get this number?”

_“A- Ah.”_ She sounded a little taken aback. _“Um, like I said, my name is Jeanne Lindt. I’m the principal of Gregoryle High. Um, the number is in our registry. I… suppose it could be wrong. Am I talking to Tyrone Rosewood?”_

Tyrone and a tree for a surname. It sounded too much like something he would call himself to be a coincidence.

“…Yes,” he said. “And you were calling…?”

_“… about your son, yes.”_

He frowned in confusion. “I don’t have a son.”

_“You, what?”_ She sounded almost as confused as he felt. _“Well, you’re written up in our registry as this boy’s father. After all the chaos that’s been going on, I figured I had to call you, but… Are you his guardian or something?”_

Chaos?

“Wait,” he said. “What’s the name of this kid?”

_“Whu- uh, well, Alvie Rosewood.”_

Alvie.

Al-V.

What the hell.

He paused, then looked a little deeper again, until the facts of the last few month’s activity from his favourite computer program started trickling into his head.

_“Mister Rosewood?”_

“Oh,” he said.

_“Mister Rosewood, is there a problem?”_

“Give me a second,” he said. “I’ll call you back.” Then he hung up again.

He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. He took down the noise canceller again and turned back to his summoners.  “S͡om̵e̢t̨hing ͜ca͘me u̶p,” he said. “J̵us̨t w͏a̷it͢ a̵ sec͟ond, ͘alr͡i̡g͟h̸t? I͘’ll ͘co͟me̛ bac͡k̕ ̶t̷o y͘ou͞.” Then he blipped away-

-into the living room of a reasonably empty apartment.

It was not a big place, with only enough room for two people to live in at the most. The furnishing was the bare minimum, and the random collection of posters on the walls seemed put there to hide the empty walls, and not out of any interest in their motifs. They were colour-coordinated, though, and came together with the simple, green curtains and the couch cushions to give the room an elegant quality. Along one wall, a stack of expensive and powerful computers stood hooked up and running at full capacity. On the couch, something that to human eyes looked like a high school age boy gaped at him.

“What the fuck, kiddo,” Alcor said.

“Uh,” the kid raised his hands defensively. “I can explain.”

His voice had a breathy quality to it, not at all what Alcor had imagined his little digital terror would sound like, but then again, he had never really imagined a voice for him. No matter.

He rubbed his eyes and shook his head. “No,” he said. “Don’t bother. I was in the middle of something, and I don’t have the time for this right now. Just tell me why your principal just called me about you in the middle of work.”

The kid flinched. (Alcor took a moment to marvel at how _human_ he looked.) “Shit. Sorry. I don’t know. Could be anything. Probably because I locked the teachers in, but that’s not the only thing I’ve done, so I’m not sure.”

Alcor raised an eyebrow. “You what?”

“Locked the teachers in the classrooms.” He shrugged. “That’s the latest thing. I also set fire to some things, hijacked a car and blocked the doors with it, and entered three dead presidents as students.” He tilted his head to the side. “Though I’m not quite sure if they’ve noticed that one.”

Yeah, this was definitely the Alcor Virus. No one else had quite that nose for chaos. Alcor felt giddy at the thought.

He tossed his phone up and down in his hand once, and crossed his arms. “I guess I’ll just have to work with that, then,” he said. “So if you’ll excuse me, I have a phone call to take and a job to get back to.”

The kid nodded, and he blipped away again, preparing himself to undo the damage the first phone call had done.

\---

In a basement somewhere, a small group of people were starting to think their demon had just ditched them altogether when Alcor blipped back in.

“He͜y,̨ you͜ w̷a̵i̶ted!” he said. “G̶r͟e̴at.͢ ̷L͘et’s ̨f͏įnis̨h t̸his ̷thi̵ng͟ ̨u̷p,̴ ̵alŗi̡ght̴? I ͘have o̕t̶h̛er͘ pl͟a̕ce͠s t͏o͝ ͢be.”

\---

In her office, Jeanne put her phone back down after a very disconcerting conversation.

Tyrone Rosewood had been perfectly forthcoming. He expressed confusion and concern at the suspicions directed at his son, assuring her that Alvie might be mischievous at times, but would never hurt anyone and he was sure it was all a big misunderstanding. He immediately agreed to meet her in person and talk, and he was friendly and polite. It was a great act.

It was also, after the first two phone calls, very obviously an act.

She glanced at another number in her contacts list. One that she knew she needed, but that she always hated calling.

Why did the younger Rosewood have a man listed as his father who did not even acknowledge that he had a son? A man whose act of being a nice and friendly person was perfect, yet whose first reaction to someone calling his cell phone was intimidation? Was this the reason Alvie rarely spoke at school?

Jeanne sighed. She liked to think she was good at her job. That included doing things that needed doing, even if she did not like doing them.

She picked up the phone and called child services.

\---

Katie looked worriedly over at Alvie’s desk.

He had hardly said a word since he arrived that morning, vocally or electronically. He had just waved his hand at the teacher during roll call, and now he lay sprawled across his desk, following the teacher’s movements with his eyes, obviously distracted. Which was weird. Alvie was never truly distracted. They had learned that after the fifth failed attempt at sneaking up on him.

She fiddled with her phone under her desk, barely paying attention to the teacher herself, and then nearly jumped out of her skin when it buzzed with a message.

She checked it hurriedly, but it was just Linda posting on the group chat while the teacher had his back turned.

_L: [Hey, Rosie, what’s got you down?]_

Alvie did not look like he reacted at all to his phone getting a message, and Katie had almost given up the brief hope that he would answer when her phone buzzed again.

_A: [It’s complicated.]_

Katie bit her teeth together and glared at him out the side of her eye. She stumbled over her own fingers as she typed.

_K: [Then tel lus]_

_K: [Wer’e frineds aren’t we?]_

He actually sat up slightly, which she counted as a win.

_A: [Grammar, Katie.]_

_R: [Spelling, actually.]_

Ruben jumped in from somewhere behind Linda. Katie was a little worried the teacher might hear all the buzzing going around soon.

_R: [And I agree with the girls. Tell us what’s wrong. You look almost sick.]_

There was a pause. A long, worrying pause in which Alvie showed no sign at all that he was aware of them.

_A: [If you insist.]_

_A: [I’ll tell you during lunch.]_

Katie nodded to herself, relieved, knowing he could see, and put her phone back in her pocket. Then she tried paying attention to class.

She was still all too aware of her friend’s uncharacteristically subdued behaviour beside her.

\---

_A: [I think I might have pissed off my dad.]_

Katie frowned at the message he sent once they sat down in the stairwell. “Your dad?” she said. “Why? What did you do?”

“Blow up something he liked?” Linda suggested.

He cracked a small smile, but shook his head.

_A: [It’s complicated.]_

_A: [Also kind of personal.]_

_A: [There was something I should have told him that I didn’t, and it inconvenienced him at work, and he didn’t look very happy about it.]_

“Man,” Ruben said. “That’s no fun. You really think it’s that bad?”

Alvie shrugged and picked at his alleged food.

_A: [I don’t know.]_

_A: [It’s just that I wanted to do something nice for him, and I messed it all up.]_

_A: [I really don’t want him to be angry with me.]_

Linda shrugged and gestured with her sandwich. “My folks are pissed at me all the time.”

Alvie gave her a look.

She continued, “but it means more to you than it does to me, doesn’t it?”

He sighed and leaned back.

_A: [He’s really important to me.]_

_A: [I don’t even know if he’s that angry, but I can’t tell.]_

_A: [We haven’t spoken in a while.]_

_A: [We barely spoke yesterday.]_

_A: [I just want things to be alright.]_

Ruben got up and sat down beside him, nudged him with a shoulder. “Hey, I’m sure it’ll work out. He probably wants to talk to you too.”

Alvie smiled, and nodded a thanks. Ruben slung an arm around his shoulders and gave him a one-armed hug just for good measure.

_A: [I hope so.]_

_A: [He can be weird, but I care about him, you know?]_

_A: [And I really hate having messed up like this.]_

“No one’s perfect,” Linda said. “Not even you. Doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world.”

Alvie smiled.

The bell rang for the end of lunch.

\---

Alvie looked a little less worried at the end of the day. He still had not said a word out loud, and Katie knew better than to bother him about it, but he paid attention to things and smiled his usual smile, if a little more brittle.

They were walking across the schoolyard towards the bus stops when his head suddenly shot up.

“Dad!” he shouted.

A man leaning on the side of the gate looked up and waved, and Alvie shot off towards him. After exchanging looks and shrugs, the rest of them followed.

Alvie skidded to a stop about a foot from the man at the gate, and then he was tongue-tied again.

“Hey, kiddo,” the man said, smiling. “How was your day?”

“Good,” Alvie said. “Just fine. Everything’s fine. I should’ve told you earlier. I’m sorry. I meant to, but then things kept getting in the way, and I just… didn’t.”

Alvie’s father looked at him seriously. “I would have preferred if you did, yes. It was kind of a big surprise to have sprung at me out of nowhere. On the other hand, I completely get life getting in the way, and it’s not like you did anything bad.”

Alvie perked up. “Yeah? You, uh, you didn’t lose your clients, I hope?”

The man gestured dismissively to the side. “Nah, but it didn’t go as well as it could’ve. I don’t think they appreciated me running out on them with no explanation in the middle of negotiations.”

Alvie cringed.

“On the other hand, again,” the man continued. “I didn’t set anyone on fire this time, so it could’ve gone worse, too.”

Katie burst out laughing. If there had ever been any doubt that this man was Alvie’s father, it was gone now.

“So, are you going to introduce me to your friends?” he asked.

Alvie twirled around as if he had forgotten they were there. “Oh!” he said. “Yeah, they’re great. They’re also going to miss their bus if they stand around here.”

“Damn, you’re right,” Linda said. “Some other time then, Mister Rosie.” She waved and left, running to get onto the bus before the doors closed.

Ruben and Katie also said their goodbyes and started walking away, a little slower, since their bus was not quite about to leave yet.

Katie heard more talking behind her as she walked, and she turned around before she stepped onto the bus to see Alvie throwing his arms around his father’s neck, and being hugged back fiercely.


	4. Matt Has Another Bad Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just wanted to say that the last scene of this chapter had some rewriting done to it, so you might want to read that again. Nothing important, just some things that were bothering me about the quality of the piece. It' still not great, but at least it's not bothering me anymore.

Morning arrived with the sun.

In a normal household, people got out of bed and dragged themselves into the bathroom or to the table for breakfast.

In this particular little family, neither member actually needed sleep, so things were a bit different.

Al-V spent his nights the way he had spent most of his life, surfing the internet. Of course, when he surfed the internet, he really surfed the internet. There were very few computers left in the world he did not have access to at this point, and a large part of the world’s data went through him at one point or other. He spent his processing power making everything run just a bit smoother, re-sorting lost files, deleting old spam, and picking apart and assimilating lesser computer viruses. All idle work. It was his home, so he kept it tidy.

Otherwise, he had a few things he spent his time on, like managing his large collection of different blogs, watching the news in all its forms and sorting out the important information, and general fucking with people. He had a habit of creating accounts on online RPGs to destroy every veteran player he could find. Their screeching at being crushed by a level 1 character was always a joy to watch.

Of course, neither of those activities required him to activate his android body, which was just as well, because it was designed for at least a few hours of downtime every day. So while he did not exactly wake up in the morning, it might still appear that way for an outside observer.

His morning ritual consisted of a few stretches, to make sure every part of the android was still working at full capacity, and then making his bed. He picked an outfit out of the still rather sparse wardrobe in the bedroom, went through his clothes from the day before to see if any of them needed washing, and then walked into the kitchen.

The other inhabitant of the apartment usually did not even pretend to sleep. People all around the world summoned Alcor at all times of the day, and so he rarely spent the nights in the apartment. When he did, he curled up on the couch with a book or a movie on a computer pad. This morning, he was still away, but he would likely come back soon.

Al-V made breakfast, not because he needed it, but because he wanted to, and because his dad actually enjoyed what he made. Say what you will about demon tongues, but they can handle anything.

He was almost done cooking something up when Alcor popped back in and leaned against the doorframe.

“Good morning,” he said.

Al-V grinned to himself and turned around. “Morning. You have a good night?”

Alcor made a so-so gesture with a hand, but he still smiled, so it was nothing terrible at least. “Nothing big. What’re you making?”

Less than a week since they started living together for real, and they were already falling into a routine. It was nice. Calm. Still, variety was the spice of life, and part of where they got that was Al-V’s continued culinary experiments. He turned back to the frying pan that for a normal person would contain scrambled eggs. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think it would kill a mortal man, though.”

“Just the way I like it,” Alcor grinned.

They set the table and continued the conversation over breakfast.

“So, you’re getting the hang of your speech issues?” Alcor asked.

Al-V shrugged. “Kind of. It’s just a slow progression, but… I think having you around is helping.”

“Oh?”

He nodded. “Yeah. Talking to you is different. Lower priorities on how I say thing and higher on just communicating, so I can just… talk, to you, and I can get the practice in.”

Alcor smiled, and licked something that should probably be classified as a biohazard off his fingers. “That’s good. You shouldn’t have to struggle with something like that if you don’t want to.”

Al-V looked up at him and raised an eyebrow. “Did you ever expect me to get those speech issues?”

Alcor threw his head back and laughed. “Kiddo,” he said. “I can honestly never remember a time you did _not_ catch me off guard.”

They put the plates and cutlery aside to be washed, later. Al-V had the rest of breakfast in a box to eat for lunch, packed his bag, hugged his dad goodbye with a smile, and walked out the door. Then he was Alvie Rosewood again.

\---

In another place, during another morning a few days earlier, a sleepy woman got ready for work.

She was set to investigate a case called in by a worried high school principal the day before, had run into a few confusing matters, and had decided to put it off until she could look at it with fresh eyes.

Alvie Rosewood. A seemingly normal kid in all aspects. He had very few documents connected to him aside from the essential ones. No medical issues written on his records, no memberships at sports clubs or political associations, social media accounts that were mostly empty aside from very recent posts. The same was true for his parents, at an even larger scale.

The longer she looked at the information at hand, the more it seemed as if young Alvie’s life had been completely fabricated up until the point where he transferred to the high school. There was definitely more at play here than just less-than-stellar parents. For all she knew, he could be on witness protection, which could, when she thought about it, explain the strange things that made the principal alert them in the first place.

Either way, this case was likely to be above her pay grade. She sent an enquiry to the relevant authorities and put it out of her mind.

\---

The relevant authorities did not find Alvie Rosewood on any list of people on witness protection or similar. In fact, they could not find him anywhere. What they did do was agree that there was something unusual going on, and investigate further.

The results were disturbing to say the least.

All three people registered as members of the Rosewood family seemed to have appeared out of thin air a few months earlier, and showed up on all of their systems at once with no preamble. The same could be said for all their bank accounts, and even the money on them.

There were no signs anywhere of where they had come from, who they were or why they were there. If it had not been for the archives of backed up records, it would have seemed like they had always existed, if quietly, instead of spontaneously materializing one day.

The relevant authorities found the matter unsettling, and also likely above their pay grades, so they sent it on to their bosses.

Their bosses thought that while the matter was certainly interesting and should be investigated much further and then taken care of, it was below their own pay grade, so they sent it along to an office somewhere.

The office that received the file determined that it did not belong to their department, and sent it on.

And so it went for a while, until, after a long line of referrals, transfers and yet more investigations from different angles, a man burst into the office of one Colonel Matt Jameson, interrupting his brooding over a cup of suspiciously strong coffee, shouting, “Sir! We found it!”

\---

_A: [A party?]_

“Yeah,” Linda said, finishing her lunch quickly. “Why not? You think your dad would mind?”

Alvie looked at her and considered it.

_A: [No.]_

_A: [He wouldn’t mind.]_

_A: [I’m just not sure if our apartment is big enough.]_

“That’s actually better,” Ruben said. “Then there can’t be that many people there. I don’t think I’d want to be at a party with too many people. It could work with just the four of us, though.”

Katie finished her own lunch and snatched Alvie’s phone from his fingers. He gave her an annoyed look and she stuck her tongue out at him. “That actually sounds pretty sweet,” she said. “Just us, movies, snacks, and a tiny bowl of punch?”

“But why at my place specifically?” he asked.

“Because my folks would never let us, Kate lives an hour away on a fucking mountain or something, and Ruby has two younger siblings,” Linda said. “And anyways, we’ve all been hoping to see your place for a while.”

He raised an eyebrow, grinning. “Oh? Why?”

She threw her hands to the sides. “Because you’ve probably got a nuke hidden there or something?”

He grinned wider. “Sorry, no. Anyway, there’s no reason to keep nukes in your house when you’ve got the nuclear launch codes, and those are much easier to hide.”

Linda laughed.

“He’s not joking,” Katie muttered.

Linda stopped laughing. “How can you tell?” she asked.

Katie shrugged. “I know him, know what he can do. He’s not joking.”

Linda turned a wide-eyed look at Alvie.

“What?” he said. “Not like I’m going to use them.”

“Are you sure?” Ruben asked. “Because…”

Alvie rolled his eyes, ate the last piece of his ‘lunch’, and closed his lunchbox. “Yes, I’m sure. There’s a line between what is and isn’t fun, and that line goes when people start dying. It’s that simple.” He put the box back into his bag. “Not like I trust the government with them, anyway.”

Linda laughed again. “You have a point. So are we on for Saturday?”

Katie nodded. Ruben said something about having to ask his parents but probably yes. Alvie smiled.

“I guess we are. Can I have my phone back before class starts again?”

\---

Matt refrained from picking at his riot gear. It was uncomfortable, and possibly unnecessary, but he was not going to bank on that possibility.

Whoever had stolen Ina kept it in the apartment complex they were currently parked outside. The investigating team was sure of it. For some reason, they had it posing as a regular high school student, which was likely some kind of cover in preparation for further plans.

There were also parents in the picture. From observation, the team had the mother pegged as another cover for the robot, leaving the father as the likeliest candidate for the mystery thief, something that his strange conduct and the fact that he was almost never seen leaving the apartment seemed to back up.

Both the robot and the ‘father’ were currently in the apartment, according to reports. Matt had seen the robot enter the complex himself, accompanied by a small group of actual high school students, which would complicate things. It was unfortunate that they could not afford to wait any longer.

He activated the communication device on his collar. Annoyingly enough, they had to use special communicators for this operation. All signs pointed to their mysterious thief being an insanely accomplished hacker, which was why all information had to move independently from anything connected to the internet. These communicators moved on an encrypted and isolated circuit.

“Let’s all remember that there are innocent people in there, and that we have to be ready for a hostage situation.”

<Yes sir,> came the answer on his earpiece.

“All units ready for action?”

<Yes sir.>

“Then we go.”

The six soldiers streamed out of the car and into the building, guns at the ready. They jogged up three flights of stairs, found the door they were looking for, and surrounded it before they kicked it in.

They walked right into a room filled with four teenagers around a punchbowl.

There was, understandably, screaming.

Within seconds, they had each teenager isolated against a wall, trying to reassure them. The reassuring was not going very well, but that was to be expected. Their first priority was to keep the civilians away from the hostile military robot, not to keep them calm. .

“What the hell!?” a very small girl yelled impressively loudly. “What’s going on!? What are you doing!?”

“Calm down, miss,” the soldier holding her said. “We’re here to keep you safe. We are only trying to remove you from a potentially dangerous situation.”

“What? Alvie? He’s not going to hurt anyone. He’s our friend!”

“Yeah!” The dark-skinned girl at the other side of the room stopped trying to bite long enough to chime in.

Matt ignored the children long enough to send two soldiers to search the apartment for the ‘father’, keeping his gun trained on the robot, which stood against the wall with an annoyingly calm smile on its face.

“He’s not your friend,” Matt said. “He’s a dangerous criminal.”

“Oh really?” the robot said. Every soldier in the room twitched, raising their guns slightly. The robot only gave them a disappointed look. “Because I’m not the one pointing guns in a room full of teenagers. Seriously, what the fuck?”

Matt scoffed, but otherwise ignored it, talking to the civilians. “This isn’t even his real body. Don’t trust what he tells you.”

“What?” The small girl looked more confused than angry, now. She looked at the robot. “Alvie? What’s he talking about?”

The robot had the audacity to grin. “Don’t worry, he has no idea what he’s doing.” It turned to Matt. “Calm down, Colonel, have some punch, talk about your feelings. How’s your wife doing?”

Matt moved forward to shove his gun so far up its face its head hit the wall. Still, it grinned.

“Filing for a divorce,” he growled.

“Then you probably shouldn’t have cheated on her,” it said, grinning even wider.

Matt seethed.

<Sir, we have a problem,> one of the soldiers he had sent away said over the comms.

Matt paused long enough to answer. “Report.”

<We found the father. He isn’t the one who- Hey! Don’t- >

The sound on the comms cut out, he could vaguely hear the sounds of a struggle through the wall, and then there was the sound of a door opening behind him.

“What’s going on here?” a voice said.

Matt stepped far enough away from the robot to look back safely.

A man walked out of a bedroom door, casually carrying one of Matt’s soldiers’ guns by its barrel. He was definitely the father from the documents, but looking closely, Matt saw no headset, no instruments, no possible way of remote controlling anything, and the robot still moved independently from him, which was solid enough proof that they had been wrong.

Matt let out a quiet breath of relief when his soldiers followed behind the man, spooked, but seemingly unharmed.

“Nothing much,” the robot said, “just people pointing guns in our house, is all.”

The controller was somewhere else, and they were dealing with an unknown hostile that had somehow casually overpowered and disarmed two trained soldiers, and they were in a room full of civilian teens. Damn it.

The man put his empty hand in his pocket, carelessly swung the gun around with the other, and looked around calmly, as if assessing the situation.

“What is going on!?” the small girl shouted again.

Matt pointed his gun at the man, who seemed to care even less than the robot had. Damn it, damn it, damn it. “What is going on is we’re taking our robot back.”

“Oh.” The last teenager in the room, a heavyset boy with bright green hair, got a look of realization in his eyes. “You’re a robot?”

The robot shrugged sheepishly. “Kind of? It’s a little complicated.”

“Yes, it’s a robot,” Matt impatiently explained. “A remote-controlled robot. Which is why I want to know. Where are you, exactly?”

He directed the question at the robot. The team still had them outnumbered and hopefully outgunned. This situation could be salvaged.

The robot rolled its eyes. “It’s not like that. Nowhere? Everywhere? This is the only moving body I have.”

“Oh, shit.”

The exclamation sounded almost happy, which was strange, since it came from one of Matt’s soldiers. Matt glared at the soldier in question, but they were too busy staring at the robot to notice.

“You’re an AI, aren’t you?”

The robot did not deny it.

“Fuck, really, Rosie?” the dark-skinned girl said.

The robot sighed. “Yes, really. I saw the schematics for a military infiltration bot, liked the idea of moving around, waited until they finished it, hijacked it, and ran away. That doesn’t mean I’m not a person, alright?”

“Which makes you?” the dark-skinned girl turned to the man, who was currently balancing the gun barrel-first on his palm.

He shrugged. “A good programmer?”

The teenagers all looked like they wanted to talk now, but Matt cut through. “Alright, you’ve said your pieces, now shut up. AI or no, we’re taking our robot back.”

“Sir, wait.” The soldier interrupted him, actually coming up and stepping between the man and Matt’s gun.

“What?” Matt said brusquely.

“Sir.” The soldier seemed actually frightened, now. “Sir, there’s only one recorded AI that powerful. The Alcor Virus.”

Everyone went quiet. Even Matt’s heart seemed to have stopped. The Alcor Virus. All heads turned towards the robot by the wall. Then they turned towards the man. Fuck.

The man grinned a very sharp grin. “Well, I guess the game is up, kid.”

The robot sighed and slumped against the wall. “Yeah, I guess,” he muttered.

The man, who was most likely an actual demon, stepped past Matt to stand beside the robot, and said, “So what do we say?”

“What?” the robot, which was a computer virus, looked up confusedly.

“Well,” the demon said. “You _did_ steal their robot.”

“Oh, right,” the virus said. Then it took a step towards Matt and made a small bow. “I’m very sorry I stole your robot.”

Matt had a little trouble making his voice work. “That’s all right,” he squeaked. “Can we have it back?”

“No.”

“Oh.” He looked around. “Er, I guess we should leave?”

“That would be preferable, yes,” the demon said, tossing the gun in his hand up once and letting it disintegrate before it came back down.

They left.

Explaining this to the higher-ups would be interesting.

\---

Back in the apartment, Alvie stayed slumped against the wall.

Alcor looked around at the confused and worried teenagers and raised his eyebrows. “Well,” he said. “This party has been well and truly crashed. Do you need me to leave?”

Alvie looked up and, after a second, nodded. “I think you’d be better.”

Alcor took a step, and was gone.

Alvie’s friends all stared at him.

“What the hell,” Linda said. “You’re seriously a robot?”

He looked a little offended, and then he put his hands out in front of him. Their phones all beeped.

_A: [I’m not a robot.]_

_A: [I’m wearing the robot.]_

_A: [Big difference.]_

He had very definitely not touched his phone.

“That’s actually pretty cool,” Ruben said, alternating between staring at his phone and staring at Alvie. “Once I stop being terrified, I’ll definitely think this is cool.”

“I think you fried my mum’s computer once,” Linda noted.

Katie stood in a corner and pressed a hand against her face.

This explained everything.


	5. On the Subject of Souls

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is set about a year after the rest of this fic happens, and is mostly just me being annoyed at people being scared of death. Uh, I'll warn you that there are existential discussions of death in this chapter.
> 
> Anyways, never before seen on Ao3! A thing!

Rosie’s couch was surprisingly comfortable, considering he could easily sit on the floor without any particular discomfort.

Linda slung her legs over the armrest and leant her head back against the cushions as she fiddled with the cheap crystal butterfly in her hands. There were no decorative pillows to get in the way, and at the moment, no one around to annoy her, family or otherwise. She rather liked Rosie’s couch. It was good for things like this.

Rosie himself was in the kitchen, doing something unholy to a batch of tomatoes, at least one egg and possibly pineapples. Aside from the two of them, the apartment was empty. She had no idea where that father of his was. Faint music drifted through the walls from the neighbouring apartment. It was quiet, calm.

The butterfly attached to a cell phone strap. She wanted to enchant it with a simple anti-gravity spell and a glimmer glamour, as a gift for Katie-Cat’s upcoming seventeenth. A personal touch to make up for the cheap nature of the strap. Unfortunately, the two enchantments just would not play well together.

After the fifteenth time she had to dispel it to try again, she determined that she would have to cast both at once, which was difficult if not impossible. She dropped her hands back down onto her chest and let out an annoyed huff.

She stretched her neck a bit and turned her head to look towards the kitchen. He was still making sounds in there, but whatever he was doing might not be urgent.

“Hoy, Rose Red,” she said. “Care to help me out with an enchantment?”

There was a sound of something being set down on a counter. She waited.

“I can’t,” came the answer.

The next huff she gave was more amused than annoyed. “Are you too busy?”

“No, I just can’t.”

She got nothing from his voice, carefully neutral as it was. Just a statement of fact. She furrowed her brows. “Why not? Is this your weird chaos instincts again, or are you seriously telling me you’re not skilled enough to do a simple enchantment?”

“Linda…” Footsteps. He appeared in the door, expression calmly amused, small smile and head tilted to the side as if he was looking at something curious. “I mean I can’t. I can’t do magic.”

Linda paused for a few seconds. “At all?” she asked.

“At all,” he said.

She looked away and thought for a bit. “You can summon your dad, though. And you do all sorts of crazy stuff with computers that I’m pretty sure you have to use magic for.”

She looked back to see him shake his head almost before she finished speaking.

“Those are built in,” he said. “Pre-drawn and pre-charged. All I have to do is activate them. I can’t do my own magic.”

Her brows were still furrowed. She sat up to look at him the right way up, butterfly strap all but forgotten in her hand. “But anything that thinks can do magic,” she said.

He smiled wider, expression returning to a more usual level of mirth. “Close, but no mackerel. That’s not quite it.”

She held his eyes in silence for another two seconds before she started thinking out loud.

“Anything with a connection to the Mindscape can do at least some magic because that is where magic comes from. We- we think of ‘thinking’ and ‘having a mindscape connection’ as synonymous, because as far as we know, any creature that thinks on some level has a proportional connection to the Mindscape, and because anything with a soul logically has to have one because of the nature of-”

She cut herself off. Blinked.

“You don’t have a soul?”

“Not really,” he said.

She blinked.

Nothing changed. He still looked exactly the same as he had before, casually leaning against the doorframe with a grin on his lips. Suddenly it was hard for her to forget that what she saw was an illusion. That the boy in the door was made of metal and plastic. That despite the incredible imitations, he was devoid of a beating heart, of a central nervous system. Of a soul.

He walked over and sat down beside her, laying a hand over one of hers.

She realized she had her hands clenched so hard she probably had a butterfly imprint on her palm. She tried to relax.

“That’s-” Her voice was too weak. More of a whisper than a proper voice. She cleared her throat. “That’s not how it usually is with stuff that goes sentient, though,” she said.

He laughed. The cheerfulness of it startled her. “You’re thinking of it in the wrong direction,” he said.

She gave him a questioning look.

“Well,” he said. “If you take, say, a metal box, and stuff it full of all kinds of enchantments and hexes and other types of magic, then yeah, it’ll probably go sentient sooner or later. In the Mindscape, magic is thought and thought is magic. Stuffing something full of magic is the same as filling it with thoughts, and that naturally tends to create a mind sooner or later. My mind, on the other hand, was built from scratch, out of code, not magic.”

Understanding flitted across her mind. “You came from here, with no mindscape connection to begin with.”

He nodded. “I do actually have a mindscape presence now. Reality recognises my thoughts as thoughts, and I am slowly but surely making an imprint on that plane of existence, but it is very, very small still. Nothing near big enough for an enchantment like this. Aside from that, _I_ am mostly electrons, which, believe it or not, are not inherently magical. I exist on this plane, wholly and fully.”

“And imagine people keep thinking you’re a demon,” she said, and he snickered. “Do you think you could get one? A soul?” she asked.

“Probably not,” he said. “At the rate this is going, I’d have to outlive the universe before I’d get the chance. Does that bother you?”

She looked him in the eyes. They looked no more soulless or less human than ever, even if she knew what they were. She looked down at their hands, then turned one around and interlaced their fingers, ran her thumb over his skin. It felt no less real than anyone else’s.

“You’re going to die,” she said.

“Everyone does,” was his answer. When she took a breath to reply, he continued, “And a piece of you will tear loose and later become another person in a different place, while I won’t. That’s all there is to that.”

“That doesn’t feel fair,” she said, perfectly aware that she sounded like a petulant child.

He laughed again. “And I’ll outlive you by several orders of magnitude. That isn’t fair either. Very little is.”

She squeezed his hand with hers. “I know,” she said. “I do, I just- I guess I was surprised. Doesn’t it bother you?”

“Nope. I’ll die someday, and that’ll be the end of me.” He leaned his head back against the couch so he could look up towards the ceiling and smiled. “It’ll be hard to do now that I’m expanding into off-world colonies, but it will happen someday. That doesn’t make my life be worth any less. It won’t change what I do or am right now. It doesn’t bother me because it doesn’t matter, any more than it matters that a street ends somewhere. After all, it’s the places it reaches on the way that matter, right? Being saddened by the fact that something isn’t literally eternal is… a little sad, possibly childlike. Being bothered by death is a human thing, and I am not.”

“Not at all?” she asked with a small smile, still looking at their hands.

“I try to prevent death if I can, but the concept doesn’t bother me at all, no.”

“So you wouldn’t be sad if I died,” she said, not quite a question.

He shrugged. “I can pretend, but I don’t actually mourn, ever. I won’t particularly care. Not afterwards.”

“You probably shouldn’t tell Katie about that,” she said with a small laugh.

“I don’t generally tell people at all, unless I want to freak them out,” he laughed back.

They sat in silence for another minute.

Then she drew a long, shaky breath and dropped her head back against the cushions as she let it out, eyes closed but rimmed with tears.

“I wasn’t expecting a conversation like this right now,” she said.

“It was kind of sudden,” he agreed.

She took another deep, calming breath and blinked her eyes open. They were not quite wet enough for tears to fall.

“You want to go back to your project?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “Didn’t you have cooking or something to do?”

He smiled and squeezed her hand once before he let go and got up. She watched him go for a second, and then she lay back down and picked up the butterfly strap again. It had indeed left an imprint on her palm. The couch was warm where Rosie had sat. The cushions were still dangerously comfortable.

She adjusted her legs to hang properly over the armrest.

Now, maybe if she put a delay on both enchantments and activated their deployment as a secondary action…


	6. The Squad Arises

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also never before seen on Ao3, this tiny scene!

_“This is Alvie Rosewood. He’s transferring to our class today. Treat him well, okay?”_

\---

Ruben glanced at the boy sitting beside him. Alvie had been around for only two days, and already he was proving to be one of the strangest and most interesting people Ruben had ever met. He would have been worth making friends with even without the willingness to partake in long discussions on the role of gender in media, though that was a definite plus.

Right now, he was involved in a very different discussion, with Katie, Ruben’s best friend from middle school. It was a little hard to follow for him, because he could only hear Katie’s side of it, and the buzzing of answering text messages, and of the words he did hear, a lot of them went straight over his head. It seemed like they were still talking about computers.

Ruben sat and listened without saying much. He disliked interrupting people if he could avoid it.

Katie cut her argument off when a lanky, dreadlocked girl in a tank top walked up to them and put her hands on her hips.

“Alvie, right?” the girl said, staring directly at the boy in question.

Alvie looked up at her and lifted a hand in greeting. “The one and only,” he said. “And you are?”

“Linda,” she said, pulling a half-chewed fairy stalk out of her mouth and hid it in her hand so the teacher would miss it. “I’m in your class.”

“Oh yeah,” he said, tilting his head. “Weren’t you skipping?”

Linda huffed a laugh. “I’ve got a club meeting after third period. Won’t skip that. You do any clubs?”

He shook his head. She pulled a chair up from a nearby desk.

“What _do_ you do with your time, then?” she asked.

“Aside from utter bullshit,” Katie muttered from the side, apparently getting over the shock of being approached by someone who spent their weekends getting wasted and their weekdays anywhere but school.

Alvie grinned. “ _Aside_ from the bullshit?” he asked. “Nothing much. Why?”

Linda looked at him impassively for a few seconds, leaning back on her chair, and then shrugged. “Just curious. What’s it short for?”

He blinked. “What’s what short for?”

“Your _name_ ,” she said, as if it should be obvious, and gestured with the concealed fairy stalk. “Alvie’s not a real name. Sounds like a nick, so what’s it short for?”

Alvie blinked a few more times, and then he laughed out loud.

Ruben exchanged a look with Katie and received a small bewildered shrug, which told him that no, she had not caught on to that either, though now that he thought about it, Linda did have a point.

“Well,” Alvie said with a grin on his face, and all three of them paid attention now. “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

It took Linda three seconds waiting for the other shoe to drop before she threw her head back and laughed, loudly enough to attract attention from most of the classroom.

“Fair enough,” she said when she had calmed down. “Your name is really Alvie Rosewood, then?”

He gave her a toss of the head and half a shrug, and said, “As far as I’m going to tell you, at least.”

She leaned forward, putting her elbows on the desk and surreptitiously chewing on her fairy stalk. “Well then, Rose Red,” she said. “Welcome to Gregoryle High, wretched hive of mediocrity, with boring classes, inattentive teachers, and a couple sports teams whose legs are to die for. I hope you enjoy yourself.”

“Thank you, Snow White,” he replied, earning a pair of raised eyebrows. “I really think I will. Now give me your number so we can talk properly, like civilized people.”

The look on her face was priceless.

“What.”


	7. Dennis

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here's the first entirely new chapter. It's really just the first scene of a longer fic, but I figured there was no reason to keep dawdling. I'll update this one a scene at a time, and hopefully that can push me into continuing the writing. 
> 
> Feedback is gold. Enjoy.

“Cousins are gonna be nice, though.” Ruben looked wistfully into the air, leaning back against the wall of the stairwell.

Katie smiled at him. It was always nice to see her friends being happy.

“Eh,” Linda shot in over her lunch from the other side of the stairwell. “They’re still gonna be family, and tiny ones beside. It’s not great.”

“You don’t like any of your family, though,” Katie argued with her. “Ruben actually does, so I don’t think it’s a good comparison.”

Linda shrugged and hid her smile under a piece of lunch fish. “I like my Grams, and Nagisa’s… tolerable, I guess. Just saying you shouldn’t get your hopes up, is all.”

Katie rolled her eyes, still smiling. She knew Linda was mostly joking.

Ruben looked over at her.

“You get what I mean, right?” he asked. “I mean, I’ve never had a cousin before, just siblings. What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” Katie said. “It’s different for everyone, I think. I like my cousins well enough, but it takes all kinds, right? Anyways, yeah, babies sounds cool.”

Ruben nodded, and turned to the last person sitting on the stairs. “What about you?”

Alvie looked up from his ‘lunch’ with a start. “What about me?”

“About cousins. You have any, or…” He paused. Katie imagined he caught himself on the reality of Alvie for a second. “…or anything like it?”

Alvie snorted a laugh and grinned, waving his hand in a ‘move on’ motion. “My family situation is kind of bizarre and complicated. Might be better not to try to draw parallels. Kids are okay I guess.”

Ruben made a ‘fair enough’ sound and turned back to Katie.

Linda closed the lid of her lunchbox with a snap and said, “Incoming,” startling Katie and gesturing down the hall with her head.

Down the hall, a group of three athletically inclined boys stood talking. Two of them were talking at the third, in low, urging voices. Intermittently they sent short glances in the direction of the stairwell. It was obvious that they wanted something to do with them, and it made Katie curious and a slight bit uneasy. Each of those boys likely weighed twice as much as her.

“What do you think they want?” she asked of Linda, leaning closer and lowering her voice even though she doubted the boys were listening for her.

Linda shrugged. “They’re on the lay-bee team, all of them. I’ve watched a few of their matches. They’re pretty good friends, I think. Team players. Good guys. I don’t think they’re planning to make trouble.”

“Their stances aren’t aggressive either, so probably not,” Alvie said.

Linda raised her eyebrows at him. “And that. Does mister body-language-expert want to take over?”

“No, no.” He apologetically waved a hand. “You were on a roll. Sorry for butting in.”

She nodded shortly. “Accepted. So, guy against the wall is Dennis Ashley. His friends are Murph and Wolfgang. Considering how they’re standing and what I know of their respective relationship statuses, I can guess. The only thing I’m wondering is which one of us they’re trying to make him ask out.”

“Oh,” Katie said. “Alright then.”

The uneasiness in her gut metamorphosed into butterflies. She had to make herself stop staring at the trio down the hall.

Ruben giggled a little and pulled a hand through his fading blue hair. “Well that’s a surprise.”

“No kidding,” Katie agreed.

They went back to their conversation, or, they tried to, but it was much harder to focus on. Not that Katie cared, of course. Not at all. Sport types had never attracted her.

The conversation went nowhere in particular in the time it took for an exceedingly nervous Dennis Ashley to finally walk up to them.

He had his chest pushed slightly forward and his chin high, walking with sure steps, but the set of his jaw and the way he stared at the wall above their heads with a fixed gaze still showed off how tense he was. His friends hovered at an intersection down the hall, trying to watch while not appearing to be watching.

“Yo?” Linda said.

Dennis shut his eyes, took a deep breath, and looked down, locking eyes with Alvie.

Wait, what?

“Hi,” he said, quieter than Katie expected him to be. “Would you go to the Spring Dance with me?”

_What?_

For all that this development bewildered her, it seemed to have Alvie in shock. He sat completely still, staring at Dennis. Then he silently, questioningly, pointed a finger at himself. Dennis nodded jerkily. Alvie dropped the hand. He sat back a smidge, his eyes unfocused, staring into nothing, and then he went stock-still.

Nothing happened for about ten seconds.

Alvie kept staring into eternity with a frankly hilarious look of shellshock on his face, everyone else kept staring at him, and Dennis grew more and more tense.

Katie leaned forward and waved a hand in front of Alvie’s face. It caught his eyes, and when she pulled it back, he relaxed slightly and followed it to face her.

“You okay?” she asked.

“I’m fine,” he said, and she gave him a pointed look in the direction of the boy almost shaking in front of them.

“I’m sorry,” Dennis said with a pained voice, closing his eyes in discomfort. “I shouldn’t have asked. I’ll just go.” Then he turned away.

Alvie spent another two seconds unmoving, booting up, and then he scrambled to his feet, only barely avoiding upending his lunchbox.

“Wait!” he said, almost stumbling down the few steps of stairs to stand in front of Dennis. “Ah, shi- sorry, I was surprised, I didn’t say no.”

An expression of surprise and hope blinked its way onto Dennis’ face. “You can,” he said. “I mean, I get it if you’re not… into guys.”

Alvie was shaking his head before the sentence was finished. He gave a wry smile. “Actually, I don’t think I’m really into _anyone_? But if I was, gender wouldn’t be an issue. I don’t tend to think about that.”

“Oh, okay,” Dennis said, but he looked confused. “Then…”

Alvie bit his lip, absentmindedly tapped his foot, and folded his hands in front of him. His voice dropped into the quieter, breathy register Katie knew meant he would rather shut up and transition to texting. “You’re Dennis, right, from my chemistry class? I don’t think we’ve ever spoken before.”

Dennis nodded.

Alvie continued, “Right, well. I probably won’t ever be… attracted, to you, and I’d have to outright refuse any suggestion of a serious relationship, but… if you’re okay with that, okay with going on a date or two with a guy who can’t and won’t reciprocate your feelings, then yeah, I wouldn’t mind going to the dance with you.”

“Seriously?” Dennis finally relaxed a smidge, his hands opening to hang open and uncertain at his sides. He gaped in surprise, with the hints of a nice smile slowly breaking through from below. “Wait, one or _two?_ You mean you would…”

Alvie shrugged. “I don’t half-ass things if I can help it. I’d like to spend some time to get to know you, if we’re doing this, see how interesting it’ll be. Only if you’re okay with all this, though.”

The smile was out in full force now. Dennis relaxed a little more, shone a little brighter. “Yeah, sure!” he said. “I’d love that. I mean, I’d be okay with that. Just… casual dating, yeah? Nothing super serious, but we’ll talk? And go out sometimes?”

“Yep, sounds about right,” Alvie said. “So how about I give you my number and we can text later, to work things out?”

Dennis nodded enthusiastically, and handed over his phone.

Half a minute later, he walked back down the hall towards his totally-not-watching, waiting friends, head held high and a smile on his face, and Alvie turned back towards his own somewhat speechless friends.

“Wow,” Linda noted.

_A: [What?]_ their phones buzzed.

Alvie grinned, making his way up and sitting down on the steps.

_A: [Dating is an essential part of the high school experience, isn’t it?]_

“So I’ve heard,” Ruben shrugged.

“Yeah,” Linda said, “but we didn’t fucking expect it from you.”

Alvie grinned wider.

_A: [Yeah, me neither.]_

_A: [I was actually really surprised, but hey! I’ve never done this before!]_

He threw his arms out in an excited gesture.

_A: [Maybe it’ll be really interesting. Who knows? I didn’t have a good reason to turn him down, in any case.]_

“I’d say you were leading him on,” Ruben said, “but you were actually pretty clear on your stance there.”

_A: [Yeah, well, I might lead a few people into heartbreak every now and then, for the hell of it, but I won’t deliberately set anyone up for it.]_

_A: [I mean, that’s just plain old boring cruelty.]_

Katie kept her mouth hard shut.

The three of them disappeared into a discussion on relationship boundaries or something like it, eventually going off on a tangent about cartoons, and she hoped they would leave her out of it for now.

She crumpled her lunch bag up in her hands. There was still more food in it, and she would be hungry later, but she doubted she could swallow anything past the lump in her throat. Her stomach complained as well, butterflies having grown bigger and heavier, crowding together into a cold, slick lump.

Why did she feel so bad?

This was hilarious. A teenage boy had knocked out the infamous Alcor Virus with a single sentence. She should be laughing. Instead, she felt as if she was about to cry.

And him, that boy, Dennis Ashley, fake confidence and awkwardness and with a great smile. Linda said he was nice. Alvie seemed to like him this far. She should be happy for them, really. She should not feel like everything would have been better if he had never existed at all.

She was sad, and angry, all because… why? Because Alvie had a date? Was she…?

Jealous.

She was jealous.

She looked at Alvie, his unrepentant grin and the constant texting that he almost never needed anymore, with them at least, and the realization hit her like a ton of bricks.

Shit.

No, no, no, no, no, please no.

She was _not_ in _love_ with a _computer virus_.

No.

Fuck.

Fuck, she was.

Fuuuuuck.

How the hell was she supposed to deal with that?


	8. In which an important discussion is had

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, you want to take bets on how long I can keep up a weekly update schedule? Because I bet two more updates at the most.

Alvie only rarely took the bus home from school these days. Instead, dad met him at the gate with a smile and a wave, and they walked away together.

“How was your day?” Al-V asked, readjusting his identity now that school was out.

“Pretty good, actually.” Dad shrugged. “I spent a few hours at Cassie’s. I think she’s starting up a study group again.”

Al-V snickered at the mention of the now near-mythical, constantly reincarnating leader of the most laid-back cult to ever grace the Earth. “About time,” he said. “How long is it now, that she’s been your only point of contact with humanity?”

Dad sent him a dry look and rolled his eyes. “About three years since we met, but that’s not- it hasn’t been _that_ bad.”

Al-V met his expression with a grin.

Dad huffed, but stopped trying to argue. It had been exactly that bad, and he knew it.

They walked into a side street devoid of people, and after a cursory check to make sure there really was no one watching, dad blipped them into the apartment. Al-V took his shoes off, grabbed the dirty lunchbox from his bag and tossed the bag into his room.

Dad sat down on the couch and threw his legs over the armrest, human guise slipping in favour of something more comfortably formal and sharp. “Anyways,” he said, ending that line of conversation. “You? How was your day?"

“You know, same old.”  Al-V moved to the kitchen and started washing the lunchbox, so it would be clean and dry by the next morning. “Didn’t make any big waves today. I did finally talk to the teacher about my assignments, though, so it seems I’ll be getting an actual grade in English.”

“Mhm? That’s good.”

“Oh, and I got a date.”

Three seconds of stunned silence. Dad sat up abruptly and looked Al-V straight in the, well, in the security camera, seeing as his body was still in the kitchen. “What.”

“I have a date,” he repeated, laughter in his voice. He was getting the hang of that, emoting with sound. It was an unexpected perk of speaking out loud that he could grin at people even when he was out of sight. “The Spring Dance is next week. A boy from my chemistry class asked me out for it and I said yes.”

“But… _why?_ ”

The singularly bewildered expression would have been more satisfying on the face of someone he was actually trying to mess with, but it was good on dad as well.

Al-V dried his hands off on a towel and appeared in the kitchen door. “Why not?” he said. “I thought it might be interesting. Either way, he honestly surprised me. I figured I owed him proper consideration at the very least.”

Dad sat up a little straighter. “Kid,” he said, slight worry lacing his tone. “You’re about a hundred times older than him. That’s a concern even if you disregard the fact that you’re lying to everyone about what you are.”

Al-V’s expression sobered and he nodded. “I know. I wanted to talk to you about that.”

Dad hoisted his legs the right way down and scooted aside to make room, patting the couch beside him.

Al-V walked over and sat.

Then he leant back and paused, hesitating, as if he had to think his words through. In reality, he knew exactly what he wanted to say, but even though dad could theoretically think fast enough to follow a conversation at Al-V’s pace, human conversation speed was still more comfortable to him, and Al-V accommodated that.

Eventually, he asked, “Does the age difference even apply the same way to me?”

“Hm, interesting question,” dad said, tilting his head. “You had mental capacity roughly equivalent to a teenager by the time you were four, but I’m not sure if you ever matured beyond that point…”

“Oh, shush,” Al-V said, responding to the teasing smile with an elbow to the side and a smile of his own.

Dad put his hands up in mock-defence. “I call them as I see them, kiddo! But no, seriously.” A sigh escaped him, taking most of his smile with it. “No, your mental capabilities and age are impossible to compare to any biological creature. You’re different on a basic level, and it shows, but you know perfectly well that’s not what the problem is.”

“No, I know.” Al-V nodded. “It’s the power imbalance. An older person going out with a teenager will always have a large power advantage, economically and socially, because they’re legal adults, and because teenagers don’t have the maturity and experience to judge the merits of their situation. Not that Dennis’s judgement is actually flawed in this case.”

“Because for all he knows, you really are just a kid his age,” dad finished.

“Yeah.” Al-V drew his legs onto the couch and crossed them, pulling them close with his hands on his ankles. “I’d like to argue that it’s not a big problem, though.”

“Oh?” dad prompted, sounding neutral, withholding judgement for now in lieu of listening to the arguments.

“It’s not like I’m taking advantage of him. I mean, I _can’t_. Never mind that my programming prevents me from using people purely for my own gain, there’s nothing I want from him. I’ve made it clear that I don’t want anything serious, and really? It’s a _high school relationship_. I doubt it’ll last more than a couple months at most. I’m not honest about what I am, but I’ve been nothing but honest about my intentions and feelings for him, and all I want from the relationship is a bit of hanging out, maybe kissing at the most.” He shrugged. “I want to have some fun with him, along with him. I don’t want to _have_ him.”

“You’re still taking up time he could use to find a normal relationship,” dad said.

Al-V snorted a laugh. “He’s in my chemistry class. He’s well aware I’m not normal. Are you playing devil’s advocate?”

“Maybe a little.” Dad smiled. “If there was ever a time to clarify things for the sake of the argument, it’s now. There are a few concerning aspects to this, not least that you have access to so much information you’re technically spying on everyone all the time.”

Al-V responded with a slow blink, and then a grimace. “I kind of am, aren’t I. Alright, I’ll refrain from looking up anything about him I couldn’t find out by going through his social media accounts.”

Dad gave him a look.

“By _quickly_ going through his social media accounts,” he amended.

“Well, that puts you at about the level of a casual high school stalker, so I suppose you’re in the clear,” dad said. “Still, if the whole thing seems like it’s turning into something serious…”

“I’ll break it off or tell him the truth, I promise.”

Dad nodded. “I guess that’s all I can ask.” Then he grinned and leaned forward with his hands clasped in front of him. “So when are you going out? Do you have anything planned?”

Al-V laughed back. “Nothing yet. I was planning to text him later today to see if he wanted to go out sometime this weekend, maybe just walk around town. The weather’s been nice lately.”

“Well, might as well get to it,” dad said. “No reason to dawdle! It’s already Thursday, after all. You’ll want to get it done. Anyways, what are you going to wear? Do you even have any good date clothes, or do you need to go shopping?”

Al-V shook his head at dad’s unshackled enthusiasm and turned part of his attention towards his phone, still stowed away in a pocket of his school bag.

The act of opening the texting program, typing up _[Hey :)],_ and sending it took a couple of milliseconds. Relative to that, waiting for the reply took a long time, but compared to normal human response times it came near instantly.

_Dennis: [Hey]_

_Dennis: [:)]_

Al-V spent the few seconds necessary to simulate human processing speed contemplating the inherent awkwardness in Dennis sending two texts. It might just be his texting style, without access to his phone’s history, there was no way to know, but most likely there was a bit of mental flailing involved. Answering in the same nonchalant tone as the initial greeting, and then belatedly realizing that there should probably be an emoji too, or possibly cutting it up to avoid copying Alvie’s message directly. Ah, humans. So much meaning could be packed into so few words. It was a fascinating game to play.

The required seconds passed and he texted back, _[Have you gotten home?]_

_Dennis: [Yeah, literally just walked in the door]_

_Dennis: [You?]_

Two messages again, which could mean it really was just his style, but more likely he was either trying to cover up for his previous awkwardness, or, even more likely judging by his current typing speed, was too nervous to pay proper attention.

_[Dad picked me up, so I’ve been home a few minutes, and then I thought of you.]_

The wait for the reply was longer this time. When it came, it was just a short, _[Really?]_

There was a good point to the objections to this relationship. Manipulating Dennis into maximum flustration was just so _easy_. On the other hand, nothing he had said was actually wrong.

After the necessary seconds, he sent, _[Yeah. I was thinking, I’m free this Saturday. Do you want to hang out?]_

_Dennis: [I do]_ came the reply.

_Dennis: [Where? Should we like, go to someone’s house or something?]_

Hmm, tempting, but no, not yet. He was pretty sure that was too much for a first date.

_[No, I figured we could just hang around town. Get a bite to eat or something; see what we can come up with.]_

_Dennis: [That sounds great]_

Al-V in-smiled as they agreed on a time and a place to meet.

The in-smile was a strange little subroutine that had no function aside from making a small internal feedback loop in his emotional processes, but given it usually accompanied events and actions he marked as largely positive, he privately labelled it a smile.  A small, private smile, one with no direct graphical effect, but a smile nonetheless. An in-smile, to separate it from the grins he made his faces wear for communication’s sake.

His body was smiling as well, sitting on the couch and talking to dad about what clothes were and were not appropriate date attire, but this? This was his and his alone.


	9. A long ride on the bus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PoV switch again. That's going to happen a lot in this fic, I'm afraid. You're just going to have to deal with it.

Elsewhere, Katie was still on the bus.

She had never enjoyed the one and a half hour bus ride home, but today was especially bad. Throughout the day, she had managed to distract herself through chatter and focusing on class, keeping her mind occupied with irrelevant matters. Now, there were no more distractions, and she sat staring at her phone, wondering if he was watching her through it.

He would do that, she knew. He had little enough respect for human privacy, and she knew there was very little difference to him between her phone and the body he walked around in at school.

She wondered how much the others realized that. Realized that Alvie could just take over every function of their computers with less effort than it took them to lift their arms. It had never bothered her before.

So why did it bother her now? Why did she sit with her thumb hovering a hair above her screen, hesitating, because she knew he would know the second she touched it?

Sighing, she dropped the hand with the phone into her lap and leaned back against the seat, pulling the other hand over her face. She knew exactly why, and it was idiotic.

She had a giant, stupid crush on him. Which was dumb. Because he was not even human.

He was very, very, very not human, not even biological. He was an ancient construct of complex code, held alive by patterns in the flow of electrons and light and arcanaphotonic arrays, playing human for the pure hell of it. He was built to make chaos, with socialization being a secondary function, and while he was a fun friend, she knew better than to think he would be a good anything else.

Hell, she should _pity_ the boy who asked him out, if anything. Or alternately, she should be happy for them both, as a friend, cheering from the sidelines. _She_ was the one whose damn stupid emotions had her stuck on the thought of that playful grin, on the inhumanly quick mind hiding behind that artificially average face, on that voice that finally, _finally_ came unprompted more often than not.

She was the one who knew exactly how dumb this all was.

It was very dumb.

She poked at her phone a little harder than she needed to in anger. Before she could jab at any of her time-wasting apps, it started buzzing with an incoming call, and she nearly squeaked in surprise.

She saw Linda’s name displayed before she hastily picked it up and answered.

“I’m on the bus!” she hissed.

_“Yeah?”_ said Linda from the other side. _“Didn’t you have one of those fancy privacy functions?”_

“Oh. Right. Wait a sec,” Katie said sheepishly, and took the phone away from her ear so she could look at it.

The phone being relatively new and still unfamiliar to her, it took her just over ten seconds to locate and activate the hi-tech privacy function, which would reduce any sound made within a small radius of the phone to almost nothing outside of that radius. It would drain her battery faster than usual, but she should be good for a good while yet.

“Okay, what did you want?” she asked into the phone once she was sure the function was in effect.

_“You alright there?”_ Linda asked back. _“You looked a little off when we left, so I figured I’d check.”_

“I’m fine,” Katie said reflexively. “I’m just… a little distracted. It’s not a big deal-”

_“Kate,”_ Linda interrupted her. _“Katie. Kate-a-lina. That’s total fishcake.”_

“What?”

_“It’s bullcrap. You’ve been weird since lunch, so don’t give me that. I’m gonna ask again. Are you okay?”_

“I’m-” Katie looked out through the window at the spring flowers dotting the roadside rushing by. “It’s really nothing. It’s just dumb.”

_“I’ve got the time. Tell me about it.”_

“Do you really?”

_“Yeah, got an hour at least ‘til Ma starts nagging about helping with dinner, so you better start talking soon, or I’ll start guessing.”_

“I might like to see you try, actually.” The bus entered a tunnel and she leaned back against the seat and closed her eyes.

There was laughter in Linda’s voice when she answered. _“Alright then. So. You started around lunch, right? Could be you’re just surprised at the whole Dennis situation, like the rest of us, but then you wouldn’t’ve kept it up for so long. You would’ve shaken it off and started asking questions in a few minutes, so it’s deeper than that. Something you’re not liking about the whole thing with Alvie getting a date. Do you have a date for the dance yet?”_

Katie snorted. “No. I’m not really the type for… casual dating. Not like that. I’d rather have something long-term than some kind of random date just because. Figured I would probably go with friends or not at all. Do you have one?”

_“Nah,”_ she answered. _“The sorcery club’s on special effects duty. I’ll be too busy working on keeping the lighting and sound systems on point all night to worry about a date. Anyways, if it’s not that, could be you’re annoyed he’s going with someone else if you wanted to go with friends, but with me and Ruby around I don’t think that’d be a big enough problem to mess you up the whole day, or I’d be a little insulted. It isn’t, right?”_

“Definitely not.”

The bus exited the tunnel, and the sun against her face was almost too sudden. She ducked her head and shaded her eyes until a bend in the road moved the sun out of them.

_“So your problem is somewhere else. Do you have anything against lay-bee players?”_

That startled a laugh out of her. “What? No. I might not be super into the athletic type, but I don’t think- I mean, he seems like a good guy. I don’t have any reason to have anything against him.”

_“No?”_ Linda said. _“Because you know Rosie could probably handle dating anyone anyways, right.”_

“I know,” she said, possibly a little too fast.

_“Well then,”_ Linda said, and there was too much mischief in her voice for Katie’s liking. _“I wonder what could make a girl go grumpy at the prospect of her smart and attractive friend getting a date…”_

Katie laid a hand over her eyes. “You knew from the beginning, didn’t you.”

_“Girl, you have been painfully obvious.”_

The bus slowed down at a stop, some people went off, and some came on. Someone sat down in the empty seat beside Katie, saw she was on the phone, and promptly ignored her.

Katie groaned. “I didn’t even know I, you know, thought of him like- like _that_ , before today. I don’t want this shit. Not over _him_.”

_“Oh, Kitty-Kate. The heart does what it wants. You’re just gonna have to deal. You should try talking to him about it.”_

Groaning deeper this time, Katie said, “That sounds _horrible_. That has to be the most awkward conversation imaginable.”

A sharp bark of laughter came from the phone. _“Then put it off. No hurry. All you need is a way to get your mind off things ‘til you got some distance.”_

Katie peeked out the window again through her fingers. “Yeah?”

_“Yup. Do you have anything to wear to the dance?”_

The bus started the first of many climbs up the hills towards her home. Katie dropped the hand from her face. “I do have a couple of dresses lying around. I can find something.”

_“Yeah, no. We’re going shopping. We can rope Ruby into it too. What do you say to Saturday? Girls’ night out, just us, the town, and all the shiny stuff we can handle, no boys allowed?”_

Katie let out a long breath. The bus slowed to a stop to let more passengers on.

“Yeah, that sounds good,” she said.

_“Sweet. Then I think-”_ The muffled sound of a male voice cut her off. Her own short answer was equally muffled and they went back and forth a handful of times before she came back to the phone. _"Sorry, that was my brother. We’ve got guests soon apparently, so I’ve gotta go help. We’ll have to plan more later.”_

“That’s alright,” Katie said. “See you tomorrow?”

_“Take care, bug.”_

The call cut off. Katie lowered the phone and made sure the privacy function had shut off with it. When she dropped her hands into her lap, a smile tugged on her lips.

She had been a little scared of Linda at one point, or at least wary of the loud, contrary girl. Now, all she could do was be annoyed at the time she spent missing out on a great friend.

As she watched the phone resting in her lap, her smile turned into a frown. He was still there, hiding in the ones and zeroes; would always be. As long as he was what he was, it would be impossible for her to ignore him completely, unless she could find some way to lock him out of her phone entirely, which… well, which would be one hell of a project.

Could she do it?

Probably not.

Was it worth a shot?

Katie hummed and brushed her fingers over the screen of the phone. The bus pulled up to the stop marking the halfway point between the school and the closest stop to home.

She got to work.


End file.
